Harper's Bride (30 page)

He shrugged. "The old man stayed in this
hotel a lot. He'd come to Portland on business, and he dragged me
along a couple of times." He smiled wickedly. "There had to have
been some benefit from carrying the Harper name."

When they reached the fifth-floor suite,
Melissa put Jenny down in the soft cushions of the midnight blue
velvet sofa. Dylan tipped the bellboy, who departed discreetly, and
they were left standing just inside the door with an awkward gulf
of silence between them.

Melissa spoke first, unable to prolong this
painful farewell any longer. "Dylan, I appreciate everything you
did for us. I don't know what would have happened to us if it
hadn't been for you. And Rafe."

"You and Jenny made living in Dawson
less . . . lonely." He almost whispered the
word. Reaching for her hand, he held it and looked into her face.
"Will you be all right?"

She lifted her shoulder slightly. "Having
money is a big help. We'll be fine," she lied. She'd once told him
that she wanted comfort and safety from life—she hadn't realized
then that he was the embodiment of those things.

"Do you think you'll visit your family?"

Melissa was torn. "I'm not sure. I guess I
owe my father the right to see his granddaughter."

He nodded. "Does he live nearby?"

"Oh, no, I grew up in Slabtown, closer to the
river. I'd never even seen this part of the city until Coy and I
got married at the courthouse."

Dylan shifted his gaze to Jenny, who'd fallen
asleep in the velvet cushions. "I'm going to miss you." Then he
looked at Melissa again and pulled on her hand to bring her closer,
closer, until she could smell his leather coat and the fresh-air
scent in his hair. His arms slid around her waist and he tipped her
chin up, trailing his fingertips along her cheek.

Oh, Dylan, she thought, please don't make
this harder than it is. Please . . .  But she
could no more pull away from him than a starving child could refuse
a crust of bread. When his lips touched hers, warm and soft and
full, her heart filled with such torment and pleasure she thought
it would break.

She wanted to beg him not to leave them, to
stay where he was loved for who he was, not who he could be made
into—loved without hesitation or reluctance.

Dylan broke away first, though. "I guess I'd
better get back to that steamer. It's docking for only two hours,
and it won't wait for me. Listen to me, now," he began, taking both
of her hands in his. "If something should happen to you or Jenny,
or if, well, there's another baby, promise you'll get in touch with
me."

Startled by his last comment, she felt her
face grow hot.

"Promise me," he insisted, and gave her hands
a light squeeze for emphasis. Her throat was so tight she could
hardly speak. "I promise."

"Okay, good. That's good." He released her
and opened the door. His eyes rested on her as if he were trying to
memorize everything about her. She couldn't imagine why—Elizabeth
was much more attractive.

Suddenly, he shot out a hand and grabbed her
by the back of the neck to pull her to his mouth for one last,
anguished kiss. "Good-bye, Melissa. Kiss Jenny for me."

Then he was gone.

*~*~*

Dylan pounded down the sidewalk, barely
seeing the traffic and other pedestrians around him. He dodged a
team pulling a Weinhard's beer wagon, making the animals shy. The
driver shouted and waved a fist at Dylan, but he just kept walking,
heading back to the
Arrow
. The tall buildings on Sixth
Avenue, cut with diagonal shadows and bright streaks of late
afternoon sun, faded away into the sharply blue sky. All he could
see was Melissa standing in front of him, dressed in her dark wool
suit and big hat, more beautiful than he wanted her to be.

After he left her, he paid off the cab driver
and sent him on. He hoped that walking back to the boat would burn
off some of the anger and emptiness he felt. As it was, he felt
like punching a wall. He wasn't mad at Melissa. He was mad at
himself.

He could almost understand why she wanted to
be on her own. After years of being dominated by drunken bullies,
first her father, then Logan, she wanted some peace and
freedom.

He could give her that, but he just didn't
know how to tell her. Willing himself to keep walking toward the
river, he resisted the driving urge to glance back over his
shoulder. If he gave in to it, he knew he'd run back to the hotel
and be on his knees in front of Melissa, begging her to come with
him to The Dalles. He could give her and Jenny a good life, and
they'd make the family he yearned for. Of course she didn't know
that. She had no idea how he felt because he couldn't tell her.

And somewhere, from whatever place his spirit
had flown to, he suspected that Raford Dubois was laughing at
him.

Where the Willamette River joined the
Columbia, the
Arrow
turned east and chugged on through the
night. It passed the high falls the Multnomah Indians told stories
about, and the small towns that dotted both the Oregon and
Washington sides of the big waterway—Troutdale, Stevenson, Hood
River. Their lights gleamed like golden stars along the
hillsides.

Dylan tossed and turned in his cramped bunk
for most of the night, drifting in and out of a troubled sleep.
Sometimes he dreamed that he was twelve years old again and in
front of his father's desk, enduring a reprimand for getting his
suit dirty in the stable. But in most of the images drifting
through his mind he saw Melissa as she'd looked the first night he
made love to her at Dawson. Her creamy skin tinted golden by low
lamplight, her pale hair tumbling in waves around her, her gray
eyes watching him with shy desire.

At last he gave up trying to sleep. Throwing
off the rough wool blanket, he pulled on his pants and shirt and
went out on deck. The air was sharp and brisk, driven by a
riverborn wind.

He leaned on the railing just before dawn,
watching the glow of a full moon in the rippling wake of the
steamer, and asked himself what the hell he planned to accomplish
on this fool's errand. He wished to God that Big Alex hadn't found
that newspaper. Then he would have lived along in ignorance a while
longer with Melissa and Jenny, instead of rushing off to The Dalles
and a purpose that remained in the hazy distance.

There was nothing for him in The Dalles—there
hadn't been since the night he left. Yet, from the moment he'd
learned about Scott and the old man, he'd felt compelled to return,
as if something drew him back to the place of his beginnings. So
strong was the pull that he'd left behind the one woman who
mattered more to him than any other, and the child he'd come to
think of as his own.

As the sunrise glowed in the east, though,
and revealed the landscape of sage and grasslands, he felt a quiet
joy of homecoming. He wished he could have brought Melissa and
Jenny here, to show them Celilo Falls, where the Indians, armed
with dip-nets and spears, fished for salmon on rickety scaffolding
over the churning river. He would take them back to the land where
he grew up—not the house and its high-flown trappings—but the
outdoors that he'd loved and which Griffin Harper had given so
little thought to. Dylan supposed that land belonged to Elizabeth
now.

Elizabeth . . . beautiful, sensual, widowed.
Suddenly, he stood upright as the
Arrow
came into sight of
The Dalles docks, and he realized why he'd come home.

He wanted to live on that land again, and he
could think of only one way to make that happen.

*~*~*

Melissa had never lived in such luxury. The
furnishings in her hotel room were upholstered in brocade and
velvet. Her windows overlooked the high, wooded hills to the west
and south. The bathroom had marble walls and a long tub of gleaming
white porcelain, and the tall mahogany bed was intricately carved
at head and foot. She and Jenny were warm, clean, and
comfortable.

But she'd trade the velvet and marble to be
back in the cramped, inconvenient little room in Dawson if she
could be with Dylan.

He'd been gone for two days, and already it
seemed that an eternity had passed. Although she'd always worked,
now time hung heavy on her hands, and she didn't care about doing
anything. She knew she ought to find a place to live and move out
of this expensive hotel, but it was easy to let someone else wait
on her for once in her life. And since the hotel staff believed
that she was Mrs. Dylan Harper, they seemed especially
solicitous.

Dylan—his face and form would not leave her
mind or heart. Sometimes when Jenny woke at night, Melissa burrowed
into the bedding in her half-sleep state, thinking that Dylan would
get up and see to her. He'd done it so often. Or she'd wake up in
the morning and expect to see him shaving at the washstand,
barefoot and shirtless.

On the third day of her moping, she knew she
had to break the cycle or she'd sit in the Portland Hotel
indefinitely, and Jenny would learn to walk in the hallways.

It was time to get on with her life.

*~*~*

"Will you wait, please? I won't be too
long."

"Yes, ma'am, don't you worry, I'll be right
here." The cab driver glanced doubtfully at Melissa, then at the
shabby street and dilapidated address he'd delivered her to. "Are
you sure you want to stop here, ma'am?"

"Yes, I'll be fine." She must have lost her
mind to ask a cab to wait—what a careless expense. If she kept
living at the hotel and spending money at this rate, she'd be
broke. But she didn't know what kind of reception waited for her
inside the house they'd pulled up to, and she wanted the option of
an easy escape.

With Jenny in her arms, she stared at the
door, then took a deep breath and started up the walk. The yard was
a ratty tangle of weeds, and the shrubbery nearly covered the front
windows. The glass pane in the front door had been broken, and a
piece of cardboard was nailed over the hole. The house's green
paint had flaked off in big patches and showed the bare wood of the
siding. Trash littered the overgrown flower beds, and an air of
apathetic squalor hung over the property. It looked worse than she
could remember, and certainly was the worst on the block. Even the
mild September sun couldn't dispel the wretchedness.

For a moment she considered turning on her
heel and getting right back into the carriage, taking Jenny away
from here and never looking back again. But Melissa hadn't escaped
this neighborhood and this life by being a coward. Tugging on the
hem of her suit jacket, she lifted a hand and knocked on the
door.

From within she heard thumping, unsteady
footsteps as they made their way to the front. Finally, the door
opened about six inches, allowing a gust of fetid odors—rancid
cooking fat, unwashed bodies, and raw sewage—to reach her nose.
Dear God, it was even worse than she'd expected.

A young man wearing only stained underwear
stared back at her, and two suspicious bloodshot eyes raked her up
and down. "Yeah? What do you want, lady?"

She recognized the hostile voice more than
the face. "James, it's me. Don't you know your own sister?"

He squinted at her, looking her up and down
again, and then peered at her face. His mouth fell open with
astonishment, revealing half-rotted teeth. At that sight, Jenny,
staring solemnly at her uncle, jumped slightly in Melissa's
arms.

"Lissy? Is it you?"

Melissa nodded, but couldn't make herself
smile at him. She was already beginning to regret coming here.

"And this is your little tyke?" James turned
and yelled to the back of the house, "Pa, Billy, get on out here.
It's Lissy. She's come home."

There was something about that last—
she's
come home
—that made Melissa very uneasy.

"Damn, I guess Coy has done all right by you.
You're fixed up like a rich man's wife." He looked past her
shoulder. "And hiring cabs, too. Well, well, Lissy."

Perhaps she was being petty, but Coy had not
contributed to her welfare in any way, and she wouldn't allow the
family to think he had. "I earned the money to buy these clothes,
James. Coy didn't have anything to do with it."

He shrugged, then opened the door wider and
stood aside to let her in. Inside the house clutter and downright
filth made her hesitate to take another step. She certainly
wouldn't sit down.

Waving in the general direction of their
surroundings, James said, "Sorry the place is a mess. Since Ma died
and you been gone, there's no one to tidy up." Then he called over
his shoulder again. "Come on, Pa, come see your fancy-dressed
daughter. Billy, shake a leg."

"Quit your yelling. Billy left early this
morning." The elder of the Reed clan emerged from the back of the
house, pulling his suspenders up to his shoulders as he shuffled to
the parlor in stockings that both bore holes. Looking every bit as
disheveled as his son, Jack Reed had more gray hair than brown now,
and the stubble of his two- or three-day beard was almost
white.

Melissa waited to feel her emotions stir;
after all, this was her father, the man she'd grown up with, and
she hadn't seen him for a long time. But she felt nothing more than
dull anger rumbling to life for everything he'd done to her and the
rest of the family.

He squinted at her, too, just as James had.
Did she really look so different to them? she wondered. Perhaps as
different as they looked to her.

"Well, Lissy, you're looking mighty
prosperous. Mighty prosperous." His rheumy, assessing gaze took
careful note of her dress and her hat.

"She came in a cab, Pa. It's still out
there." James added.

Jack stumped to the window and pushed aside
the grimy curtain. "So it is."

"Who's this you brought with you?"

She shifted Jenny in her arms. "This is your
granddaughter, Pa. Her name is Jenny Abigail. I thought you'd want
to meet her." But with every passing moment she became more
convinced that she'd made a mistake in coming here.